Hands-On Design Patterns with C++

Serialization and deserialization with Visitor

The problem itself was described in details in the previous section—for serialization, each object needs to be converted to a sequence of bits, and these bits need to be stored or copied or sent. The first part of the action depends on the object (each object is converted differently) but the second part depends on the specific application of the serialization (saving to disk is different from sending across the network). The implementation depends on two factors, hence the need for double dispatch, which is exactly what the Visitor pattern provides. Furthermore, if we have a way to serialize some object and then deserialize it (reconstruct the object from the sequence of bits), we should use ...